Saturday, November 5, 2016

(After Hindu activists demolished a
mosque in a small town in Rajasthan, the on-line magazine OutlookIndia published
a comment with an entirely predictable message by the well-known secularist
Yoginder Sikand. At the editor's invitation, I wrote the following rebuttal, published on
31 August 2001.)

In his article "Sanctified Vandalism As A Political
Tool"
(www.OutLooklndia.com, Aug. 23, 2001), Yoginder Sikand tries to explain away
Muslim iconoclasm as marginal and uncharacteristic, all while accusing the Hindus and others of just such iconoclasm. In
both endeavours, he predictably relies on Richard Eatons book Essays on Islam and Indian
History (OUP Delhi 2000).

According to Sikand, Eaton clearly shows that cases of
destruction of places of worship were not restricted to Muslim rulers
alone. He recounts numerous instances of Hindu kings having torn down
Hindu temples, in addition to Jaina and Buddhist shrines. He says that
these must be seen as, above all, powerful politically symbolic acts. Follows a list of such allegations
against historical Hindu kings.

As it takes at least a page to
evaluate or refute an allegation uttered in a single sentence, I cannot discuss
those allegations here, so I will accept for the sake of argument that there
have indeed been instances
of Hindu kings looting Hindu idols and destroying Hindu temples for political
purposes.
However, it is obvious that these do not create Sikand's desired impression of symmetry
between Hindu and Muslim iconoclasm. Such symmetry would require that
like Hindu kings, whose goal was political rather than religious, Muslim kings
also destroyed places of worship of their own religion. Eaton and Sikand
would succeed in blurring the contrast between Hindu and Muslim attitudes to
places of worship if they could present a sizable list of mosques
destroyed by Muslim conquerors.

In a further attempt to blame even
Islamic iconoclasm on the alleged Hindu example, Sikand quotes Eaton again: It is clear that temples had been
the natural sites for the contestation of kingly authority well before the
coming of Muslim Turks to India. Not surprisingly, Turkish invaders, when
attempting to plant their own rule in early medieval India, followed and
continued established patterns. How strange then that the Muslim records never invoke the
Hindu example: invariably they cite Islamic scripture and precedent as
justification for desecrating Pagan temples. As we shall see, the
justification was provided outside of the Hindu sphere of influence in
7th-century Arabia.

But at least Sikand admits the fact
of Islamic iconoclasm: It
is true that, as the historical records show, some Muslim kings did indeed
destroy Hindu temples. This even Muslims themselves would hardly dispute. However, Sikand claims that unnamed
Hindutva
sources
have grossly exaggerated the record of Islamic temple destruction: Richard Eaton points out that of the
sixty thousand-odd cases of temple destruction by Muslim rulers cited by
contemporary Hindutva sources one may identify only eighty instances whose historicity appears to be
reasonably certain.

In his seminal book Hindu
Temples: What Happened to Them, independent Hindu historian Sita Ram Goel
has listed two thousand cases where a mosque was built in forcible replacement
of a Hindu temple. Not one of these verifiable items has been proven
false, not by Sikand nor by Eaton or other eminent historians. It is also
instructive to see for oneself what Eaton's purported eighty
cases are, on pp. 128-132 of his book. These turn out not to concern
individual places of worship, but campaigns of destruction affecting whole
cities with numerous temples at once. Among the items on Eaton's list, we find Delhi under Mohammed Ghori's onslaught, 1193, or Benares under the Ghurid conquest, 1194, and again under Aurangzeb's temple-destruction campaign, 1669.
On each of these three occasions, literally hundreds of
temples were sacked. In the case of Delhi, we all know how the single Quwwat-ul-Islam
mosque replaced 27 temples, incorporating their rubble. At this rate,
Eaton's
eighty instances easily match Goel's two thousand, perhaps even the
unnamed Hindutva author's
sixty
thousand.

Sikand continues with the oft-used
argument: Caution
must be exercised in accepting the narratives provided by medieval writers
about the exploits of kings, including their feats
of temple destruction. Most historians were employees of the royal
courts, and they tended to exaggerate the exploits of the kings in order to present them as great champions of
Islam, an image that hardly fits the facts that we know about them. So, as Sikand admits in so many
words, the Muslim chroniclers were collectively convinced that they could
enhance the standing of their patrons as champions of Islam by attributing to them feats of temple destruction. Perhaps some of them were liars, as Sikand alleges,
and merely attributed these feats of temple destruction to kings who had no
such merit. But fact is: all of them, liars as well as truth-tellers,
acted on the collectively accepted premise that a good Muslim ruler is one who
extirpates idolatry including its material places and objects of worship.
They all believed that Islam justifies and requires the destruction of idol
temples. And rest assured that, like the Taliban, they had received a far
more thorough training in Islamic theology than Eaton or Sikand.

In a further attempt to minimize
Muslim iconoclasm, Sikand claims: As in the case of Hindu rulers attacks on temples, Eaton says that almost all instances of
Muslim rulers destroying Hindu shrines were recorded in the wake of their
capture of enemy territory. Once these territories were fully integrated
into their dominions, few temples were targetted. This itself clearly
shows that these acts were motivated, above all, by political concerns and not
by a religious impulse to extirpate idolatry.

In fact, there were plenty of cases
of temple destruction unrelated to conquest, the best-known being Aurangzebs razing of thousands of temples
which his predecessors had allowed to come up. But I concede that stable
Muslim kingdoms often allowed less prominent temples to function, most openly
the Moghul empire from Akbar to Shah Jahan. This was precisely because
they could only achieve stability by making a compromise with the majority
population.

Islamic clerics could preach all
they wanted about Islamic purity and the extirpation of idolatry, but rulers
had to face battlefield realities (apart from being constrained by the
never-ending faction fights within the Muslim elite) and were forced to
understand that they could not afford to provoke Hindus too far.

Akbar's genius consisted in enlisting enough Hindu support or
acquiescence to maintain a stable Muslim empire. After Aurangzeb broke
Akbar's
compromise, the Moghul empire started falling apart under the pressure of the
Maratha, Jat, Rajput and Sikh rebellions, thus proving the need for compromise
a contrario.

In order to justify this compromise
theologically, the zimma system originally designed for Christians and
Jews (but excluding polytheists, a category comprising Hindus) was adapted to
Indian conditions. This zimma or "charter of toleration" implied the imposition of a number of humiliating constraints
on the non-Muslim subjects or zimmi-s, such as the toleration tax or
jizya, but at least it allowed them to continue practising their religion in a
discreet manner. The long-term design was to make the non-Islamic
religions die out gradually by imposing permanent incentives for conversion to
Islam, as witnessed by the slow plummeting of Christian demography in Egypt or
Syria, from over 90% in the 7th century via some 50% in the 12th century to
about 10% today. The system had the same impact in South Asia, yielding
Muslim majorities in the areas longest or most intensely under Muslim control.

To varying extents, the zimma
system could include permission to rebuild destroyed churches or temples.
But even then, non-Muslim places of worship, though tolerated in principle,
were not safe from Muslim destruction or expropriation. The Ummayad
mosque in Damascus was once a cathedral, as was the Aya Sophia in Istambul; the
Mezquita of Cordova was built in replacement of a demolished church.
Eaton and Sikand can propose their rosy scenario of Islamic iconoclasts
emulating an imaginary Hindu iconoclasm only by keeping the non-Indian part of
Muslim history out of view. It is entirely clear from the Muslim records
that these temple-destroyers consciously repeated in India what earlier Muslim
rulers had done in West Asia. The first of these rulers was the Prophet
Mohammed himself. And this brings us to the crux of Sikands argument.

When the Taliban ordered the
destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas, a secularist choir assured us that this had
nothing to do with genuine
Islam.
To me it seems rather pretentious for secularists with their studied ignorance
of religions to claim better knowledge of Islam than the Taliban, the "students (of Islam)", whose mental horizon consists of
nothing but the detailed knowledge of Islamic theology and jurisprudence.
Nonetheless, Sikand repeats the exercise: "Most importantly, a distinction must be made between Islamic
commandments, on the one hand, and the acts of individual Muslims on the
other. The Quran in no way sanctions the destruction of the places of
worship of people of other faiths."

In deciding what is genuinely
Islamic and what is not, it must be borne in mind that Islamic law is very
largely based on the precedents set by the Prophet. Thus, it is lawful to
kill Rushdie because the Prophet himself had had his critics executed or
murdered. Likewise, the Taliban could justify their destruction of the
Bamiyan Buddhas with reference to Prophet's own exemplary iconoclasm. The primary Islamic
sources on the Prophet's
career (the Hadis and Sira) teach us that during his conquest of
Arabia, he did destroy all functioning temples of the Arab Pagans, as well as a
Christian church. When he was clearly winning the war, many tribes chose
to avoid humiliation and martyrdom by crossing over to his side, but he would
only allow them to join him on condition that they first destroy their
idols. The truly crucial event was Prophet's entry into the Kaaba, the central shrine of Arabia's native religion, where he and his
nephew Ali smashed the 360 idols with their own hands.

When prophet Mohammed appeared on
the scene, Arabia was a multicultural country endowed with Pagan shrines,
churches, synagogues and Zoroastrian fire-temples. When he died, all the
non-Muslims had been converted, expelled or killed, and their places of worship laid waste or turned
into mosques. As he had ordered before his death, only one religion
remained in Arabia. If we were to believe Yoginder Sikand, Mohammed's iconoclasm was non-Islamic.
In reality, Mohammed's
conduct is the definitional standard of what it is to be a good Muslim.

It is true that the Quran has little
to say on temple destruction, though it is very eloquent on Mohammed's programme of replacing all other
religions with his own (which obviously implies replacing temples with
mosques). Yet, the Quran too provides justification for the smashing of
the objects of non-Islamic worship. It claims that Abraham was the
ancestor of the Arabs through Ismail, that his father had been an idol-maker,
that he himself ordered the idols of his tribe destroyed (Q.37:93), and that he
built the Kaaba as the first mosque, free of idols. It further describes how
Abraham was rewarded for these virtuous acts. Obviously it cannot be
un-Islamic to emulate a man described by the Quran as the first Muslim and
favoured by Allah.

If Abraham existed at all, the only
source about him is the Bible, which carries none of this "information". It tells us that Ismail was
the son of Abraham's
Egyptian concubine Hagar, and that she took her son back to Egypt; Arabia is
not in the picture at all. Nor do pre-Islamic Arab inscriptions mention
Abraham, or Ismail or their purported aniconic worship in the Kaaba. The
Quranic story about them is pure myth. Considering the secularist record
on lambasting myths, I wonder why Sikand has not
bothered to pour scorn on this Quranic myth yet.

All the same, Islamic apologists
regularly. justify the desecration of the Kaaba by Prophet Mohammed as a mere
restoration of Abraham's
monotheistic mosque which had been usurped by the polytheists. This
happens to be exactly the justification given by Hindus for the demolition of
the Babri Masjid, with this difference that the preexistence of a Hindu temple
at the Babri Masjid site is a historical fact, while the preexistence of
monotheistic and aniconic worship established by Abraham at the Kaaba is pure
myth. At any rate, the Islamic account itself establishes that the model
man Prophet Mohammed desecrated the Kaaba and forcibly turned it into a mosque,
setting an example, particularly, for Mahmud Ghaznavi, Aurangzeb and the
Taliban to emulate.

Let us conclude with a comment on
Sikand's
conclusion: "Hindus
and Muslims alike, then, have been equally guilty of destroying places of worship,
and, in this regard, as in any other, neither has a monopoly of virtue or
vice. The destruction of the mosque in Rajasthan and building a temple in
its place, like the tearing down of the Babri Masjid by Hindutva zealots or the
vandalism of the Bamiyan Buddhas by the Taliban, shows how sanctified vandalism
and medieval notions of the politics of revenge are still alive and thriving in
our part of the world."

Look how claims are smuggled into
this conclusion which have not been established in Sikand's argumentation. Even by
Sikand's
own figures, Hindus and Muslims were far from "equally" guilty, as a handful of alleged cases of temple destruction
by Hindus do not equal the "eighty"
well-attested Islamic cases. Also, the notion of revenge, attributed here
to Hindus and Muslims alike, does not apply to both. The Hindu kar sevaks
in Ayodhya were arguably taking revenge for the destruction of the pre-existing
Rama Mandir, but the Islamic destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas was not a case
of revenge on anyone. The Taliban or Afghan Islam in general had not been
hurt or threatened by Buddhists or by any other religion. Their
iconoclasm was not a case of vengeance, but of unilateral and unprovoked
aggression.

Nobody in this forum, or so I hope,
claims a "monopoly
of virtue"
for the members of one religion, nor that of vice for those of another.
The problem with religions is that they can make virtuous people commit vicious
acts out of innocent piety, viz. by ordaining vicious behaviour as divinely
sanctioned. In spite of Sikand's attempt to whitewash Aurangzeb, evidence remains plentiful
that this Moghul emperor committed acts of persecution and iconoclasm which
would generally be considered vicious (they certainly would if committed by
Hindutva activists, witness the torrent of abuse after the demolition of the
Babri Masjid). Yet, by all accounts, Aurangzeb was a virtuous man, not
given to self-indulgence, eager to fulfil his duties. Likewise, the
Kashmiri "militants" who massacre Hindus are not people
of evil character. They have left fairly cosy jobs or schools behind to
put their lives on the line for their ideal, viz. bringing Kashmir under
Islamic rule. It is the contents of their religion which makes
them cross the line between their own goodness and the evil of their terrorist
acts. The problem is not Muslims, the problem is Islam.

The founding texts as well as the
history of Islam testify to the profound link between iconoclasm and the basic
injunction of the Prophet, viz. that "until ye believe in Allah alone, enmity and hate shall reign
between us"
(Q.60:4), i.e. between Muslims and non-Muslims. I can understand that a
peace-loving Muslim who is comfortable with religious pluralism would have
problems with this quotation, and generally with the unpleasant record of the
founder and role model of his religion. Having wrestled with the Catholic
faith in which I grew up, I know from experience that outgrowing one's religion can be a long and painful
process. Regarding a Muslim's reluctance to face these facts, I would therefore counsel
compassion and patience.

But Yoginder Sikand doesn't have this excuse. For him as
a secularist, facing and affirming the defects of religions should come
naturally. One of the best-documented defects of any religion is the role
of Islamic doctrine in the destruction of other people's cultural treasures, rivalled only
by Christianity in some of its phases, and surpassed only in the 20th century
by Communism. A secularist should subject the record of Islam to
criticism, not to a whitewash.

13 comments:

And shame on these elite secularists who cannot refute based on fact or logic but wonderfully entertain and amuse us with their mombo jumbo. Dignity of life lies in truth. To outgrow Christianity, Islam or any other false belief system is to overcome all those falsifications which one is exlosed to since his childhood and live a dignified life with love in heart and with the spirit of coexistence.

Dr Elst I want to ask something. As we know technology is developing very fast though it may necessarily not amount to any spiritual enlightenment. So to which end will it lead all of us to?Further in the long run Hinduism may overpower Christianity and Islam, but can this development peacefully coexist with a Hindu identity?

Great article as usual, but it seems that Bengal wasn't under Muslim rule very long compared to some other areas, yet it had a huge Muslim population by the time the British took surveys. Of course the Muslim invaders like Bakhtyar performed their usual destruction of temples and massacres of recalcitrant pagans. Also, was the desecration of temples by Hindu princes in pre-Islamic times perhaps more similar to the Mesopotamian practice of carting off a defeated foes idols to humiliate them than to Abrahamic iconoclasm?

KE QUOTE: "The Quran in no way sanctions the destruction of the places of worship of people of other faiths....In deciding what is genuinely Islamic and what is not, it must be borne in mind that Islamic law is very largely based on the precedents set by the Prophet."

Seems obvious, doesn't it? Their holy scripture is said to have originated through divine inspiration, thus clearly primary in determining what is genuinely Islamic, whereas the prophet may or may not act according to the scripture during his life. Another hint regarding whether he was leading a genuinely pure life may be the custom of adding the PBUH when mentioning him, like a kind of mantra that makes sure he does not get reincarnated, steadily improving his karmic balance.

There is another explanation: The previous polytheists & co. were already degraded in their worship, so they needed to reignite their beliefs by going through a period of monotheism, supplied by this new-born religion, as a "sign of times to come", marking yet another era in their history.

What I'm saying is: they needed it, regardless whether they were consciously aware of it. In a similar sense, whatever happens in someone's life is needed (in terms of his spiritual development too), regardless whether one is consciously aware of it or not. It applies equally to all kinds of (spiritual) beings, though their particular experiences may vary greatly.

KE QUOTE: "The problem with religions is that they can make virtuous people commit vicious acts ...The problem is not Muslims, the problem is Islam. "

It means these people weren't that virtuous after all. Their acts/words speak about them, about their state of mind, their spirituality, their karmic burden. The "problem" is their own lack of Self-realization (in the spiritual sense), temporarily substituted by misinterpretations out of ignorance, under the veil of Maya. Thus, ignorant people will interpret things they encounter (including Quran or Islam) in ignorant ways and act in a similar fashion until they become ready for something better in their life.

Which is what happens when differences of opinion regarding issues of importance become serious enough for people to wage wars over.

In a more general sense, the enmity arises between believers and non-believers in the supreme Deity. The epilogue of this enmity for the current period of Kali Yuga, at least in the Hindu part of the world, is described in the Kalki Purana.

About Me

Koenraad Elst (°Leuven 1959) distinguished himself early on as eager to learn and to dissent. After a few hippie years he studied at the KU Leuven, obtaining MA degrees in Sinology, Indology and Philosophy. After a research stay at Benares Hindu University he did original fieldwork for a doctorate on Hindu nationalism, which he obtained magna cum laude in 1998.
As an independent researcher he earned laurels and ostracism with his findings on hot items like Islam, multiculturalism and the secular state, the roots of Indo-European, the Ayodhya temple/mosque dispute and Mahatma Gandhi's legacy. He also published on the interface of religion and politics, correlative cosmologies, the dark side of Buddhism, the reinvention of Hinduism, technical points of Indian and Chinese philosophies, various language policy issues, Maoism, the renewed relevance of Confucius in conservatism, the increasing Asian stamp on integrating world civilization, direct democracy, the defence of threatened freedoms, and the Belgian question. Regarding religion, he combines human sympathy with substantive skepticism.